Evaluations on the Consequences of Fire Suppression and the Ecological Effects of Fuel Treatment Scenarios in a Boreal Forest of the Great Xing’an Mountains, China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript titled "Evaluations on the Consequences of Fire Suppression and the 2 Ecological Effects of Fuel Treatment Scenarios in a Boreal For- 3 est of the Great Xing’an Mountains, China" is well written and can be accepted with minor corrections.

1) Can the Authors discuss fire suppression/management history in the landscape in the study area section?

2) 2.3. LANDIS parameterization: Please provide more details about datasets. maybe in a table.

3) why datasets were used only between 1990 and 2000? 

4) Authors don't provide much detail about fire data, its quality, and why they assume mean fire return intervals are the same in different land cover types. Please provide some quantitative data for Mean FRI and burned area.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The fire behavior studies for fuel treatments used by practitioners are frequently qualitative. Many of the input data included in scenarios are simplification and estimating values therefore results may be difficult to accurately compute and lessons from simulation studies may be misleading when are generalized to real phenomena.

In the reviewed manuscript, the authors described the tested object and the boundary conditions of the simulation too generally. Below are examples of inaccuracies:

line 112. the cool temperate zone - cool is subjective, please give the average temperature for the year or a temperature range

line 113. warm, wet, short summers, and cold, dry, long winters - give temperatures, humidity, the amount of rainfall, length of seasons

Eg line 144, 160 The terms "and so on" are incorrect and may be misleading. Authors should list specific factors or provide selected factors

Line 157 mean – should be average?

Line 218-219 – Changes in forest cover in the world in the last 10 years have been very dynamic. What impact could the use of data from 1990 have had on the obtained results?

Line 236-237 - What impact could the use of data from 1990 have had on the obtained results?

Line 281 282 – should be “numbers”

Line 393 - If this is a finding (discovery), it could not have been reported in previous publications

Line 437 - should be Conclusions

Line 444 – It is a truth as old as time

The manuscript requires careful linguistic correction, both stylistic and grammatical. Some errors are highlighted in the text.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript presents a very good simulation study of the effects of fire suppression and fuel reduction on forest fire regime and fuel load, tree species abundance and age structure (not real age structure but mainly mature trees) and forest landscape patterns. 

The followings are my suggested changes and revisions:

1. In the Abstract the subsentence in lines 26 and 27 is very confusing. It needs to be revised to make it clear what it means. Why not use a separate sentence to explain it. Based on the results, the nine fuel treatments changed natural forest successional patterns.

2. There is one silly mistake which should have been easily found and corrected before submitting to the journal.  In the Results, Section 3.2 (in line 333) and Section 3.3 (in line 354) have the same subtitle. The subtitle for Section 3.3 should be "Effects of fire suppression and fuel treatments on forest landscape pattern" as for Section 4.3 in the Discussion. 

3. In line 342 the authors used the term "Mature species (MAS)". What is a "mature species"? A species is a species in evolution. There is no such term as a "mature species". I guess here that the authors wanted to say is "mature trees" as they have defined in Table 1 (see the Mature column) and line 404 "mature tree species".

4. In line 118 "... Picea Koraiensis..." the species name should be in lower case koraiensis not in the capital (upper case).

In line 430, "we found that various fuel treatment...", should be treatments in plural.

5. In line 376, "To alleviate catastrophic forest occurrences, fire suppressions..." should be "To alleviate catastrophic forest fire occurrences, fire suppressions". Add fire between "forest" and "occurrences".

6. In lines 401 and 402, "Our results showed that fire suppression increased the abundance of larch while decreased the abundance of white birch". Why is that the case? The authors need to explain it better than currently in the discussion section 4.2. Both species are shade intolerant pioneer. But birch seeds dispersed much far away than larch and it also can regenerate vegetatively from sprouts. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been greatly improved, but in my opinion, requires further minor changes.

General remark:

Explanations should be included in the content of the article and available to every reader, not just presented in response to the reviewer.

Detailed comments:

Line 115 February is the coldest month, with an average of 28.9℃. Maybe it should be - 28.9℃?

Line 418-419 – better species composition - species abundance    the authors meant percentage composition rather than wealth

Line 420 – 422 “Larch is a shade-tolerant and non-pioneer species. White birch is a shade-intolerant and pioneer species. White birch has a strong seed dispersal and colonization ability, which makes it easy for it to invade open spaces created by disturbance.”  – No continuity of the argument. It is not clear how shade tolerance relates to the results of the research.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx